Georgia’s U.S. senators wishing for a Christmas runoff gift may have gotten a lump of coal heading into the holiday break instead after plans for political back-patting for a newly passed COVID-19 relief package were demolished.
President Donald Trump is calling for increasing the stimulus checks in the legislation to $2,000 per American rather than the $600 included in the relief bill, handing the two Democratic contenders in the Senate runoff elections new ammunition to blast the Republican incumbents over their response to the pandemic.
“Georgia families can’t wait: $2,000 checks should be passed now,” said Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist church, who is running against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
“$600 is a joke,” said Jon Ossoff, the owner of an investigative journalism company running as a Democrat against Republican Sen. David Perdue.
The remarks came after Trump called the $600 stimulus checks “a disgrace” on Tuesday night, less than a day after Congress passed the $900 billion COVID-19 package, which had been delayed for months as each party blamed the other for hobbling negotiations.
Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman, pivoted Wednesday to highlight foreign aid dollars in the COVID-19 bill that Trump and Senate Republicans have criticized, rather than saying outright whether she would support the president’s call for $2,000 stimulus checks.
“I’ll certainly look at supporting it if it repurposes wasteful spending toward that,” Loeffler said at a Cobb County rally.
Amid the COVID-19 debate this week, her campaign’s allies attacked Warnock over police body-camera footage showing an altercation between him and his ex-wife, who claimed Warnock drove over her foot with a car during an argument. Warnock insists he did not actually run over his ex-wife’s foot.
Perdue has not said yet whether he supports increasing the stimulus checks. His campaign released a new television ad Tuesday praising the COVID-19 relief package and criticizing Ossoff for not backing it.
Before Trump’s comments, both Republican campaigns hailed the package passed this week as a victory, touting its extension of small-business loans, emergency funding for schools and an additional $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits.
“We will continue to take historic action to protect and rebuild our communities from this unprecedented crisis and we will not stop fighting for the people of Georgia,” Perdue and Loeffler said in a joint statement.
Congress won’t be back in session until next week after a move by House Democrats to power through the $2,000 stimulus checks on Thursday was blocked. Trump has not yet signed the COVID-19 relief package with the $600 checks that Congress sent to his desk on Monday.
Meanwhile, Trump has also vetoed a defense spending package over a move to rename military bases named after Confederate figures. Perdue and Loeffler had backed the defense bill, prompting pressure from Democrats to override the veto despite the Republicans’ staunch support for Trump.
Georgia Democratic leaders quickly seized on Trump’s intra-party curveballs to blast Loeffler and Perdue as the heated runoff races for their seats head down the final campaign stretch to the Jan. 5 election.
“$2,000 is literally the difference between people paying their bills right now, being put out on the street, or eating right now,” said U.S. Rep.-elect Nikema Williams of Atlanta, who currently chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia.
Wins by both Ossoff and Warnock would hand Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and the White House for at least the next two years, following President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in last month’s presidential election. A win by either Republican incumbent would block that scenario.
The three-week early voting period for the Jan. 5 runoffs began last week.